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They Took A Camera To A Remote Area In Greenland, And What They Recorded Is Simply Terrifying

This is a special Upworthy series about encouraging action on climate change. Made Possible by Planet Victory;

Narrative:

Narrator: I’m on the phone with Jim on one of our regular check-ins. Jim, just nothing is happening. Hey, Jim. It’s going well. We had some serious bouts of wind, but other than things are fairly well set up here. We’ve got some continuous time lapse going…

Male: Yeah, in that V-section right there. Holy shit, look at that big bird rolling.

Narrator: All four are running, right? Look at that. You see how… Look at the whole thing. The calving face is 300, sometimes 400 feet tall. Pieces of ice were shooting up out of the ocean 600 feet, and then falling. The only way that you can really try to put it into scale with human reference is if you imagine Manhattan, and all of a sudden, all of those buildings just start to rumble, and quake, and peel off and just fall over, fall over and roll around. This whole massive city just breaking apart in front of your eyes. We’re just observers. It’s two little dots on this side of it now. And we watched and recorded the largest witness calving event ever caught on tape.

Presenter: So how big was this calving event that we just looked at? We’ll resort to some illustrations again to give you a sense of scale. It’s as if the entire lower tip of Manhattan broke off, except that the thickness, the height of it, is equivalent to buildings that are two-and-a-half or three times higher than they are.

Narrator: That’s a magical, miraculous, horrible, scary thing. I don’t know that anybody has really seen the miracle and horror of that.

Presenter: It took a hundred years for it to retreat eight miles from 1900 to 2000. From 2000 to 2010 it retreated nine miles. So in ten years it retreated more than it had in the previous 100.